How to Sell Tickets Online
Posted: Thursday, August 19, 2010
by Malkay
http://www.handytix.com
Many venue owners would like the ability to sell tickets to their performances over the internet through their own internet site, but may perhaps be uncertain of the right way to start. Here's a brief overview of what is required .
To start with, you'll either need to acquire a box-office ticketing software system, or more advantageously for smaller venues, sign up with a hosted ticketing service. If you choose to purchase box office ticket software package outright, the advantage is you will not normally be faced with recurring costs, excepting perhaps for some support charges or possibly additional charges for any upgrades and product enhancements or bug fixes . With a hosted system though , the software provider hosts the box office software program on their own servers so you usually won't have any major capital investment and any upgrades or enhancements will be routinely installed at no extra cost . But in this case the ticketing software provider will charge for the service provided based on either the value of all tickets sold through the system , the quantity of tickets sold or maybe a monthly charge . So to some extent, the choice of which type of ticketing system to use to sell tickets online will depend on how many tickets you expect to sell, the price of the tickets, and the cost of any maintenance fees or upgrade fees for purchased software.
The other side of the ticketing program is the web side . Setting up the Web user interface will either involve inserting a few lines of code into a specific page on your website or alternatively the ticketing software company will create a template page which looks exactly like your current Web site pages. in this instance, the ticketing and payment will be carried out on a different on a different web address but will be connected by a "buy tickets here" button or similar. To all intents and purposes however a patron would not be aware that they had been redirected to a different URL. This page will display all your events or performances, which may be grouped together by date and time , venue or address or program name. A customer will then click on the name of event which will take them to the seat selection page. After selecting the seats they require , the patron then proceeds to the payment page where they enter their credit card details.
To receive payment for tickets sold , you normally have two main options. Firstly the ticketing software provider may handle the payments entirely and receive all payments into a holding account. In this case, the ticket income is normally only transferred to the venue operator's bank account once the event has finished or perhaps on a month-to-month basis. A charge for processing the credit card payments will probably be deducted from the balance transferred.
The next option is to establish your own payment gateway and merchant account, in which case all ticket revenue will be deposited into the account of the venue operator as soon as any ticket is sold. The ticketing software provider will usually invoice their licencing or usage fees for the system on a month by month basis in this case. Another option is to set up an account with PayPal which will avoid the need to set up a payment gateway/merchant account.
After completing the online transaction , the customer may be given the option of either having the tickets posted directly to them, printing PDF tickets at home, or receiving an e-mail exchange voucher which they take to the box office prior to the event and switch for actual tickets. With print at home PDF tickets , you should remember that there is zero stopping any person from replicating the PDF ticket. This can be a problem for non reserved seating events. With reserved seating events, it is not so much of a problem since obviously two people cannot sit in the same seat. One way of solving this difficulty is to have all tickets printed with barcodes, but obviously this implies that some form of bar code scanning device is required at the doorway to the venue. Bar code scanners will require connection to a PC and will either validate valid transactions from a previously downloaded data file or will require a live connection to the Internet service and the ticketing database . The other alternative is to mail out all tickets. But in this case an appropriate ticket printer will be required . Although specialist thermal ticket printers which are the ideal method of printing box office tickets, are generally quite high-priced, many ticket sales software systems will fortunately permit tickets to be printed by a standard laser or inkjet printer.
Basically however, nowadays there is very little impediment for even the smallest of schools, or non profit organizations from selling tickets online given that ticketing software systems are increasingly affordable, easy to set up and easy to use.
When selecting ticket sales software be sure you also investigate the features you should expect in advanced box office software systems.
This Article has been viewed 258 times. (Not updated in real-time.)
No comments yet.We want your comments! If you can read this, you don't have javascript enabled, so you can't use this comment system. Please enable javascript.